I'm a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and have written for a wide
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The Genius of "One Percenters" Is Their Amazing Command of the Obvious

* Arkansas merchant Sam Walton opened a store called Wal-Mart to offer people everyday bargains. He focused on under-served markets, expanded his business aggressively and became a billionaire. Why didn’t anybody else do these things long ago? We all know people would rather pay less than more.

* The U.S. Post Office doesn’t seem to deliver routine mail any faster than it did one or two hundred years ago, yet postal rates keep going up. Why, then, did it take so long for someone – Mississippi-born college student Fred Smith – to do the obvious thing and start pursuing the idea of a nation-wide overnight delivery service in the form of FedEx? He too became a billionaire.

* Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral loved to hike in the mountains, and he wondered how burrs got stuck in his pants – a phenomenon that almost all of us have seen at one time or another. Mestral studied the burrs and noticed how tiny hooks caught the loops of fabric. He got an idea for a new kind of fastener: tiny hooks on one side and tiny loops on the other. Such a fastener might be more convenient than zippers – just press the two sides together. Although Mestral hadn’t been looking for a better fastener, he began to tinker and eventually obtained a patent for what became known as Velcro.

* And what could be a more obvious road to riches than hamburgers! Some people did very well selling cheap, consistently good hamburgers with fast service, but they were content to keep their business local. When Illinois kitchen equipment salesman Ray Kroc came along, he immediately recognized the obvious, that such a business could be expanded nationally and internationally, and he went on to make his fortune. We know his creation today as McDonald’s.

These are just a few examples of people who displayed an amazing command of the obvious. They learned to be keen observers of what was happening around them. They observed actively and reflected on the meaning of what they saw – even if it was unexpected. They had intellectual curiosity and were always wondering why things happened as they did. They understood that criticism or failure could be an opportunity in disguise. People with an amazing command of the obvious seem to enjoy being observers in this ever changing world. More examples:

Saratoga Springs, New York hotel chef George Crum reportedly had a customer who complained that his fried potatoes were too thick and soggy. Crum tried slicing the potatoes paper-thin and stir-frying them so they would be crisp. The customer was delighted, and plenty of other people were, too. They became a regular item on the menu, known as Saratoga Crisps. Later, of course, somebody started calling them potato chips.

Greek-born physician Georgios Papanikolaou did research to find out exactly what happened during a woman’s menstrual cycle. He studied samples of vaginal fluid under a microscope. After examining many slides, he came across one with recognizable cancer cells. It turned out the patient, in fact, had cancer. Papanikolaou realized that a simple test on a small, easily obtained sample of vaginal fluid could provide an early warning sign of cancer. Hence, the “Pap test” that helps save lives.

English researchers Peter Dunn and Albert Wood were investigating compounds that had potential to lower blood pressure. One of the compounds didn’t work as hoped, and the temptation was to cross it off the list, stay focused on the search for an anti-hypertensive and move on to the next compound. But many men who tried the dud drug reported experiencing more erections. Instead of accelerating blood flow to the heart, the compound accelerated blood flow to the penis. The alert researchers realized they might be onto something, although it wasn’t what they were looking for. Further investigation confirmed the unanticipated effects of the compound. It was patented and approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for treating erectile dysfunction. Dubbed Viagra, Pfizer‘s unexpected innovation has generated annual revenues over $1 billion.

When Patsy Sherman went to work as a research chemist for the 3M company in 1952, she was assigned to work on fluorochemical polymers (large molecules with fluorine). “We were trying to develop a new kind of rubber for jet aircraft fuel lines,” she explained, “when one of the lab assistants accidentally dropped a glass bottle that contained a batch of synthetic latex I had made. Some of the latex mixture splashed on the assistant’s canvas tennis shoes.” Sherman and one of her associates Sam Smith found that the mixture couldn’t be washed off, even with a solvent. Nor, for that matter, could Sherman or Smith get the tennis shoes dirty, because they were protected by the hardened mixture.

Sherman and Smith weren’t looking for something to protect fabrics, but they recognized that’s what they had, and it was potentially useful. It went on sale as Scotchgard in 1956, and it became the most widely-used treatment for protecting clothes, shoes, furniture and carpets, among other things.

At Cincinnati-based soap-maker Kutol Chemicals, Noah McVicker came up with a compound for cleaning wallpaper. His nephew Joseph McVicker learned that nursery school children were playing with it, because it could be easily modeled, it didn’t stain anything, and it was nontoxic – principal ingredients included flour and water.

Joseph McVicker wondered if there might be commercial possibilities. He and Noah established Rainbow Crafts Company to market the compound as Play-Doh. It proved to be popular, and the McVickers obtained a patent for it in 1965. That year they sold Rainbow Crafts to General Mills. Play-Doh came to be distributed in some 75 countries, with hundreds of millions of cans sold.

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